Canadian political commentary on the American election riles FOX news:

[jeffreyab]

FOX news has discovered that not only does the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cover American elections they also say bad things about the candidates:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9796193

The commentator cannot believe that Canada allows publicly funded independent points of view.

The offending column is available here:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/09/05/f-vp-mallick.html

In it Heather Mallick, herself from rural Northern Ontario, says:

"I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right."

She also quotes another Canadian commentator John Doyle:

"John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I'd had the wit to come up with it first. It's safer than "white trash" but I'll pluck safety out of the nettle danger. Or something.

Doyle's job includes watching a lot of reality television and he's well-versed in the backstory. White trash — not trailer trash, that's something different — is rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush himself), suspicious of the urban, frankly disbelieving of the foreign, and a fan of the American cliché of authenticity. The semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave."

Comments

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

Only a fucking idiot would call a man with a degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard "unlettered".

It's even funnier coming from a proud graduate of the University of Toronto, which is famous for. . .

what exactally?

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

Inventing insulin, ask any diabetic if that was signifigant.

I also graduated from there.

In her defense Bush does tend to emphasize his rural Texas aspect life on his ranch, rather than his Ivy League education, its part of the image he projects.

Bush was that renegade country boy from Texas not that Ivy League intellectual when he ran for president.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Bush was raised in Connecticut, not that anyone goes out of their way to point that out very often.

I can't stand Heather Mallick, and this is another column where she doesn't get it right. Choosing Sarah Palin was a brilliant political move by the Republican Party, even if no one in it can understand why except in a short-bus kind of way. She is the Great Red Herring of 2008 - with six weeks to go until the election, people will be so gaga over her, um, let's say "complicated" life and its details that the same old dance will go on undisturbed behind the curtains...

[reddherring1955.livejournal.com]

Palin the Great Red Herring of 2008? Not sure how to take that. Possibly cursors at dawn in cyber space?